The lack of preparation characteristic of good stump speaking was the aspect of it which enabled him to make a success. He was a man who could think out a plan of campaign but not the ramifications of an idea or the best way of expressing it. Mrs. Hanna contributes an account of her husband's one attempt to prepare himself for his new job. It was President McKinley who first urged upon him the absolute necessity of his appearance on the platform during the fall campaign of 1897. "If I go on the stump," Mr. Hanna replied, "I'll never be elected. I can't stand up before a crowd and talk." Mr. McKinley encouraged him, advised him to think the matter over, lock himself in his library and write at least one speech, which could be changed from time to time to meet the special needs of particular crowds. "When you have written it," said Mr. McKinley, "fetch it to me, and I will look it over." The next Sunday Mr. Hanna dutifully disappeared into his library after supper and sat up until midnight, wrestling with the composition of his speech. As he finished the sheets, he put them into a drawer of his desk, and the next morning after breakfast he took them out and read them. Mrs. Hanna says that she will never forget the look of utter disgust that possessed his face during the reading. At the end he tore the sheets to pieces and threw them into the waste paper basket. "That," he said, pointing to the waste paper basket, "is the weakest and most sickening stuff I have ever read." Mark Hanna had to do things in his own way. He could not make or write a speech à la McKinley.

Thereafter he never prepared a speech or the outline of a speech. When on the stump he never carried with him notes, references, books or information and memoranda of any kind. So far as his intimate friends could judge he never even needed to turn over in his own mind the substance of what he proposed to say. His private secretary, Mr. Elmer Dover, states that he did not know definitely what he would talk about until he got upon his feet. Yet he was always ready for the three or four speeches that might comprise the day's work, and each of them would have its own special propriety and point. The only part of these speeches of which he needed some conscious preliminary control was the very beginning. He usually planned the first sentence or two. The rest of it followed of its

own momentum, just as a conversation may take its own course after a subject has once been introduced. When he was in good form, he was able to talk on in this way for an hour or more, without pausing for an idea or scarcely for a word.

Naturally he did not acquire such facility immediately or without an introductory period of distress. In the beginning it required on his part a great effort to face an audience. Mrs. Hanna says that on the occasion of his first few political speeches he turned pale with discomforture. In one case his obvious distress was such that she feared he would faint. For a long time he lacked self-confidence on the platform and dreaded when the moment for his appearance arrived. During his first stumping tour in the fall of 1897 he began with little speeches which required not more than fifteen minutes to deliver. By the end of the campaign he could run on for half an hour without effort or loss of energy. The time came when he began to enjoy it and take pride in his success. After a long period of confinement in his office nothing amused or rested him so much as a week on the stump. It was exhilarating without being fatiguing. It benefited him in much the same way that a vacation accompanied by hard outdoor exercise benefited other men. It stirred him up mind and body, and he returned home refreshed and happy.

Eventually he came to be a very effective public speaker. His success was caused chiefly by the sympathetic understanding which he had the power of establishing between himself and his audience. He impressed them immediately as a largehearted, genial and sincere man, wholly without pretence and humbug. They felt the attraction and the force of his personality. He talked to them as he might talk to a group of friends, with simple words, in a confidential manner and on occasions with bursts of explosive feeling. He did not need to prepare these speeches, because they consisted, not of ideas which he had derived from others, but of a few deep convictions based exclusively on his own life or the lives of his own people. Everything that he had to say was on the top of his mind. His public speaking was an artless revelation of his own personality and his own experience, which accounts for the ease with which he took it up and its popular success. His audiences were for the

most part captivated by the man, and they were easily convinced by a group of ideas, based upon so familiar and typical an experience.

Beginning merely as a stump speaker, he finally found it as easy to talk in public about other than political topics. Several of his most successful speeches had nothing to do with politics; but whatever the subject, the substance and the method were always the same. In June, 1903, he had, for instance, been asked to make the principal address at the seventy-fifth anniversary of the foundation of Kenyon College, and he had consented to do so. His promise had, however, escaped his memory, and he went to Gambier on the appointed day merely, as he thought, in the capacity of guest. When he saw his name on the program, he was very much embarrassed; but he rose to the occasion. His speech, which was as usual composed in the face of his audience and under the stimulus of its presence, has been described by those who heard it, for the most part educated and trained men, as adequate and excellent of its kind.

Speeches such as those of Mr. Hanna do not read as well as they sound. They had a colloquial rather than a rhetorical value. They were deficient in structure, in sequence and even in the thorough expression of a single idea. They rambled about from one subject to another, with frequent retracing of paths already trod, and with abrupt chasms between one part of the journey and the next. Particularly in the beginning, the wording was sometimes clumsy, and the meaning of particular sentences obscure. The second half of a long sentence would sometimes lose any sense of filial responsibility towards the first half. But with practice Mr. Hanna gradually overcame the most obvious of these faults. He could never make a coherent speech culminating in a climax. When his feelings were very much aroused, his expression of them was forcible and explosive rather than intense and dignified. He was not, that is, an orator any more than he was a statesman; but his style of speaking suited his own audiences and message better than would any outbursts of sustained and impassioned eloquence. His own personality supplied the wire which tied all his paragraphs and sentences together, and which gave consistency if

not coherence to his discourse, and force if not light to his explosions.

During the fall of 1897 Mr. Hanna spoke almost every day from September 21 until November 1. His tour covered a large part of the state and included the small towns as well as the cities. The late Senator Frye, who shared many of the platforms with him, testified that day by day Mr. Hanna gained in self-confidence and in his mastery of his hearers. The meetings were unusually large; but during the first tour the audiences were not particularly enthusiastic. They seemed to be prompted more by curiosity than a cordial and sympathetic interest. Two years later when Mr. Frye and Mr. Hanna covered substantially the same territory on another tour their audiences were, according to Mr. Frye, both larger and far more enthusiastic than they had been in 1897.

The voters of Ohio had much more reason in the fall of 1897 to be curious about Mr. Hanna than to have confidence in him. He was one of the best advertised men in the country, but the people did not know him. While they had read a great deal about him in the newspapers, their reading probably misrepresented him and predisposed them against him. He had been portrayed by his opponents as a monster of sordid greed, and as the embodiment of all that was worst in American politics and business. The ordinary man had no convincing reason for entirely rejecting these charges. Even though he discounted them heavily, he might well be prejudiced against their victim. But in any event he would be curious to see the person who was said to have made a President, and who was said to have done these and other things with such evil intentions and by virtue of such dubious methods. He would be all the more curious because Mr. Hanna had become the issue of the campaign. The candidate was being bitterly assailed by the Democrats. All the regular accusations were being revived and being spouted from every Democratic platform. Mr. William J. Bryan was pressed into service, and the campaign of the preceding year was fought over again—but with this difference: the new campaign became essentially personal. The attacks were concentrated on the man who had acted as general during the previous year; and the hope of the Demo

crats was that by the defeat of Mr. Hanna they could claim a reversal of the earlier verdict, weaken the administration and exclude their conqueror from public life.

I shall not quote from the speeches in which Mr. Hanna very vigorously defended himself and in his turn attacked his opponents. The course of political controversy during the next few years enabled Mr. Hanna at a later date to express very much more definitely the group of economic ideas which he believed would contribute most effectually to the welfare of the American people. The substance of his characteristic policy was, indeed, plainly foreshadowed in these earlier speeches. He was already declaring that the dominant purpose of the government's economic legislation should be the stimulation of business activity, and that as a result of such stimulation prosperity would be fairly and evenly distributed throughout the whole of the economic body. He was already claiming that the Dingley Law, which had recently been enacted, had actually begun the work of rescuing business from the depression which had prevailed since 1893. But the prosperity actually created in the fall of 1897 was neither sufficiently emphatic nor sufficiently prevalent to permit the complete and confident development of the foregoing argument. And we may postpone a completer presentation of it until Mr. Hanna could claim with more plausibility and conviction that the national economic policy of the Republican party had actually restored the American people to a condition of comparative comfort and hope. For the rest the general issues involved by Mr. Hanna's personal campaign were an echo of the discussion of the preceding fall. Mr. Bryan's participation in the discussion and the renewal of his pro-silver proselytizing were sufficient to effect this result.

In replying to the personal attacks upon himself Mr. Hanna always spoke with moderation and good judgment. He knew that the best possible answer to the grotesque misrepresentation of which he had been the victim was merely to show himself on the platform and to give his audiences the sense of his personality. So he usually began by saying that no doubt many of his hearers had come to see whether or not he had a pair of horns actually growing upon his head. Specific charges he would deny with a rough indignation that always made an